Posts

Fighting anxiety like my life depends on it

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TLDR: The struggle is real. In January 2025, during a vacation from work, I focused on a few philosophical exercises that decreased my anxiety to an astonishing degree. I recommend them wholeheartedly. However, in spite of keeping up those habits in February, going back to work immediately re-ignited my bad anxious habits… I would say to an equally astonishing degree! This forced me to wonder why these philosophical exercises did not rescue me in this new context and to reckon with the depth of my anxiety disorder – its intensity, pervasiveness, and origin. I share all the philosophical insights I can muster. Anxiety is what happens when you sense that you are in a situation of “problematic uncertainty” 1 . You feel that you lack information in a way that leaves you vulnerable to a potential threat. The French have this wonderful idiom that literally translate as “I do not know what sauce I am going to be eaten with” 2 . It means that we do not know what to expect exactly (though ...
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2025 New Year’s resolutions: Back to Mindfulness, the ‘Time Since’ method, and neglecting OCD rituals

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I have decided on my New Year’s resolutions for 2025 and I thought I would share them with you since, in case you haven’t noticed, this philosophy blog is a lifestyle blog. These resolutions are just as much philosophical experimentations as the other practices I talk about here, so I think it might interest you. First, Some Good Advice I’ve Heard      A good piece of advice I have heard about New Year’s resolutions is that it is more effective to have one resolution per month instead of resolutions for the whole year. Unfortunately for me, I cannot follow this advice, because I am already busy dedicating every month to a new philosophical exercise for the grand experiment that is this blog. That said… I suppose that another way of thinking about it is that I am already following that advice very well! And this one-practice-per-month method really worked for me in 2024! So I am both eager to do more, and wo...
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Walking the Land

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In November 2024, I focused on an eco-philosophy exercise called “Walking the land”. It consists in immersing yourself in the care-taking of a piece of land, th us experiencing the land’s possibilities, needs and resistances. With time, you come to view yourself primarily as a caretaker of nature. Now… A month was too short to uncover all aspects of this exercise, but I have a few remarks already. The practice is very intriguing, but I found it interestingly difficult to access.      Freya Mathews’ article “ ‘Walking the Land’: an Alternative to Discourse as a Path to Ecological Consciousness and Peace” 1 tackles a fascinating problem: environmental philosophers have debunked the anthropocentric ideology that underpins the systematic exploitation and destruction of nature, yet this has not resulted in society shifting towards ecological consciousness. As the article explains , this state of affair s can be explained by “historical materialism”: it is the mode...
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